The illusion of external agency

People typically underestimate their capacity to generate satisfaction with future outcomes. When people experience such self-generated satisfaction, they may mistakenly conclude that it was caused by an influential, insightful, and benevolent external agent. In three laboratory experiments, participants who were allowed to generate satisfaction with their outcomes were especially likely to conclude that an external agent had subliminally influenced their choice of partners (Study 1), had insight into their musical preferences (Study 2), and had benevolent intentions when giving them a stuffed animal (Study 3). These results suggest that belief in omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent external agents, such as God, may derive in part from people's failure to recognize that they have generated their own satisfaction.     

The momentary realist

Research suggests that people initially take their subjective experience of an object as an accurate reflection of the object's properties, and only subsequently, occasionally, and effortfully consider the possibility that their experience was influenced by extraneous factors. The two studies reported here demonstrate that this is true even when the extraneous factors are the person's own dispositions. Dispositionally happy and unhappy participants were falsely told that they had been subliminally primed with words that might have influenced their moods, and were then asked to identify those words. Dispositionally happy participants were more likely than dispositionally unhappy participants to conclude that they had been primed with positive words, but only when they made these judgments under time pressure. The results are discussed in terms of correction models of human judgment.     

Role of Informal Integration in Career Advancement: Investigations in Plural and Multicultural Organizations and Implications for Diversity Valuation

The major question which this research examinedis whether informal integration is likely to result incareer advancement and perceived resources within twodifferent organizational contexts (plural and multicultural). Specifically, we examinedinteractions of race, gender, and organization type onthe above two outcome variables. In pluralorganizations, employees are expected to assimilate intothe dominant culture, while in multicultural organizations,cultural change for the individual and the organizationis reciprocal. Hypotheses were tested with a combinedsample of 101 men, 35 women, 29 persons of color, and 107 whites. Results indicated that,congruent with predictions, greater social integrationoccurred in an organizational context in which valuingdifferences was a priority. Further, the influence of informal integration on career advancement wasstill important even after controlling for suchvariables as age, organizational tenure, education, andhierarchical level within the organization. Implications of these findings for valuing diversity arediscussed.     

Myrtle McGraw''s Unrecognized Conceptual Contribution to Developmental Psychology

In the late nineteenth century and through much of the twentieth century, the notion of the early developmental autonomy of motor behavior pervaded behavioral embryology and the developmental psychology of infant behavior. In the midst of this predeterministic climate of opinion concerning motor development, Myrtle McGraw briefly and tentatively broached the probabilistic epigenetic notion of a bidirectional or reciprocal relationship between structural maturation and function, whereby structural maturation of the nervous system is influenced by functional activity as well as the other way around. Myrtle McGraw thus anticipated our current understanding of the role of experience in the cortical and motor maturation of infants in the first year of postnatal life. It is all the more remarkable that she made this contribution when the theoretical climate of opinion was epitomized by predeterministic epigenetic thinking. In the same vein, McGraw's second unrecognized contribution is her clear formulation of a suitably flexible critical period concept in 1935, one that is consonant with our current understanding.     

AUDITORY PITCH AS A PERCEPTUAL ANALOGUE TO ODOR QUALITY

Abstract— Experiments in cross-modal matching suggest that smells can be arranged by odor qualify along the color dimensions of hue and lightness. Here we report that subjects readily adjust the loudness-equalized pitch of on auditory tone to match a stimulus odor. The results allow odors to be arranged in sequence by their pitch-equivalents. The tone matches appear to be based on perceptual feature of olfaction other than stimulus intensity or pleasantness. The results suggest that features of odor quality may be more accessible and structured than previously acknowledged.     

Increased regional cerebral glucose metabolism and semantic memory performance in Alzheimer's disease: A pilot double blind transdermal nicotine positron emission tomography study

Nicotinic receptor dysfunction and impaired semantic memory occur early in Alzheimer's disease patients (AD). Previous research implied that nicotine's ability to enhance alertness, arousal, and cognition in a number of nonclinical populations was a function of its ability to stimulate CNS nicotinic cholinergic receptors. In this study it was hypothesized that transdermal administration of nicotine would increase both regional cerebral glucose metabolism (rCMRglc) and semantic memory (as assessed by verbal fluency). Two mild AD and two elderly controls underwent positron emission tomography scanning during a double blind nicotinic agonist verbal fluency challenge procedure. rCMRglc increases occurred in both AD patients, but not controls. In the two AD patients, verbal fluency scores increased by an average of 17%. One elderly control's verbal fluency increased, and the other decreased. These findings suggest that nicotine's effect on metabolism and verbal fluency is due to its ability to stimulate the cholinergic system.